On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> You could use a processing instruction ala
>
> ...
> <?meta index="no">
You mean <?meta index="no"?>, right, to satisfy XML rules
for processing instructions?
If metainformation inside a document's body are treated as something best
presented as processing instructions, why would the existing syntax of
<meta> elements be justified, then? There's no reason why metadata should
always apply to the document as a whole only. The crucial question is what
metadata is and how it should be presented. Indexing issues might be
debatable in this respect (but you implicitly counted them as metadata by
your choice of the name "meta" here :-)).
The syntax of <meta> elements is not very satisfactory in existing HTML,
and might need quite some modifications. But independently of this, is
there any good reason to disallow them inside <body>? The obvious
semantics would be that the <meta> element relates to the content of its
parent element, except when it appears inside a <head> element, in which
case it relates to the root element. (On the other hand, the distinction
between <head> and <body> might itself be unnecessary and potentially
misleading.)
(Of course, <meta> elements with http-equiv attribute relate to the
document as a whole by definition. They are a different beast and need
consideration of their own.)
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/